Destination Primus Vita: a narrative puzzle game

CA$ 51,553

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LET'S PUSH IT ON OUR LAST DAY!

The Lipsynch System will truly bring our characters to life!

Discover the team.

Primus Vita is an episodic first-person narrative puzzle game.

This extraordinary experience happens when the protagonist is in cryo-sleep: to keep the mind fully stimulated during the space trip, NIM, the ship's AI, has created a simulation which the ship's inhabitants are living in.

The player will have to explore the environment and find clues, collect items that tell stories, and talk with the other characters to deepen and strengthen their relationships.

The other characters will also give you clues to help you solve the puzzles - like in real life, where sometimes you need help from your friends to overcome difficult challenges!

The Prime Vitans stealing our Water...

Let's have a deeper look at the universe of Primus Vita and its main characters.

In the year 2353, no one on Earth was optimistic about the future of humanity. But the biggest threat turned out to be something else entirely. Aliens invaded, and within five days, stole almost all of our water, and left us for dead.

But we survived.

Hundred of years later, in 3044, our special Crew 121 are on their way to Primus Vita, on a mission to take our water back.

The members of the Crew are:

Austin Blair, the quantum physics scientist working hard to find a way to confront the Primevitans;

Coby Blair, the capable lieutenant - also Austin's little brother;

Artemis Gracco, the wild, but sensitive GI, and Coby's best friend;

Hayao Mutsami, the zen - but drug-dependent - botanist;

BrX Stewart, the mountain of muscles with a dark past;

Geny Obomsawin, our communications expert, much more curious about the Primevitans then anyone else.

In preparation for this important mission, NIM will put them through many cerebral challenges as well as emotionally charged memories.

Solve puzzles and collaborate in a narrative first-person experience

In the game, the player will have to both solve puzzles and develop relationships with others.

First, you'll be introduced into the environment that NIM will create for the protagonist.

Each character will have a different setting, depending on what their main task will be on Primus Vita. NIM will project some environments and situations that the characters might encounter on Primus VIta.

As mentioned earlier, the player will have two main goals: solve all the puzzles, and enhance all relationships. To solve the puzzles, the player will have to find clues in the environment, but also in their memories.

Let's have a look at the different elements we'll have in the game:

Use Mind Stimulation to progress

The protagonist's psychological stability or health, and the player’s global score. Increase it by doing any positive action (completing a puzzle, finding lore, etc.) The Mind Stimulation will give you an overall snapshot of your global progression throughout the entire episode.

Use Clue card for a little help

A puzzle clue necessary to complete a puzzle. Each puzzle has one to five clues. Each clue reduces the difficulty of the puzzle. Some puzzles will be almost impossible to solve without the clues, but if you're up to the challenge, you'll be able to get the Puzzle Expert Trophy!

Improve relationships to unlock character lore

The relationship strength of the player’s protagonist with each other characters. The scale for each character will give you an instant idea of how strong your relationship is with each one.

Improve the relationship to unlock character lore, and don't forget, the goal of the simulation is to enhance both the cognitive and emotive side of our protagonists. The relationships will grow with the dialogues you discover along the experience.

Collect all Data Cards

Lore information about Primus Vita's universe, including unique art and writing. Player can read the collected Data Cards from the AR menu. We are currently planning to have 30 lore data cards per episode.

One important element of the experience will be the fantastic settings that we have. Because the game takes place in a simulation, it is possible to create weird and wonderful settings, reflecting the subconscience of each character.

Crew 121 is composed of six main characters that we'll follow during our six episodes.

Austin will be the protagonist in our first episode. Her main goal in life is to be able to beat the Aliens' technology. She has to be able to replicate the Shatters, the gigantic adversaries they'll face on Primus Vita.

Posing Study for Austin

Personality research in the posing for some characters

ARTEMIS

Posing research - Artemis

COBY

And for Coby

The rest of the crew, Geny, BrX and Hayao, are currently in the process of being modelled in 3D. In the meantime, we invite you to go on our Primus Vita website and have a read of our mini-stories, which you can find on our Blog!

Epsilon Games is a new studio, founded in Montreal in early 2017, but is composed of an experienced team: we've worked on AAA games such as Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia, Far Cry and Splinter Cell, and also on more mainstream games such as Just Dance, Myst, and Eagle Flight.

Together, we believe we can cover all aspects of game development and deliver every episode with a unique, cerebral and emotional experience.

And we're proud to say that we are the first Dev Studio with a gender-parity policy!

And here we are!

We already published the first issue of the comic book that runs alongside the story in the game, where we can follow our Crew arriving on Primus Vita and getting to know the human base, and the challenges they will face. We are now finishing the second issue!

Primus Vita - Comic Book's first issue

Many of our reward tiers include a digital or physical copy of the comic book, so you can have a closer look!

Where does the money go?

So, once we have the money, where do we spend it? As you can see if you've played our demo, we have made some incredible progress already, but we still have a few months of work ahead of us to complete Volume One. We are all putting our own money in this project and we want to be able to finish what we started. We already received some financing also from Canada Media Funds, but we now need your help too.

We want to create the best experience possible for a narrative puzzle game, with our incredible cast of characters. Help us bring them all to life!

Here is how the money will be spent:

We already have a playable demo (download it on Steam!) that is somewhere between a playable prototype and a demo, as we wanted to test our gameplay/exploration/narrative loop. We have had good feedback already but we invite you to continue to send it to us, via our Facebook,Twitter, or on the community page on Steam. Of course, you can visit our main website through the entire year! www.primusvita.com.

Risks and challenges

All projects have their fair amount of risks. In videogame development, there are many of them, and we're trying to mitigate for as many as possible.

We're a team of committed, experienced developers. We have already invested a lot of our own money, time and energy into this, and we're not ready to give up.

Epsilon Games is ours. We will ship this video game, whatever the cost: as we mentioned, we've already invested a lot into it, and we absolutely want to see it come to life.

We've already delivered a demo on Steam in a quite short amount of time. We've proven to ourselves - and to you - that we can deliver this game, and also we did it to try and test our concept (go for it - we need all the feedback possible!) We want to make a game that has a good balance between narrative and gameplay puzzles, a game that we have dreamed of for many years.

The main risk for us would be running out of money, but like we've mentioned, we are investing our own money into this project. This Kickstarter is to help us finance the first volume, containing episode 1, 2 and 3. It'll allow us to breathe a little more and take - if needed - a little more time to polish the series and even develop new features that the community will ask for.

NOW is the time to help us! Any amount of money is welcome, there is no such things as small or big pledges: all are welcome!